Composting What No Longer Serves: Organizational Lessons for a Time of Reckoning
In a moment of cultural rupture—where authoritarianism is rising, polarization deepens, and public trust frays—organizations across sectors are grappling with a hard truth: many of our strategies, structures, and assumptions no longer serve us. The world is changing, but the ways we work often aren’t keeping pace.
Urgency dominates. Scarcity drives decisions. Exhaustion is treated as a personal problem instead of a systemic signal.
Recently, I facilitated a strategy workshop with a group of justice-centered leaders. Rather than jumping to new solutions, we paused to ask a more essential question:
What must we let go of in order to move forward?
Using the metaphor of composting, we invited participants to name what needed releasing—old beliefs, outdated strategies, and unspoken burdens. The point wasn’t just reflection. It was regeneration. Composting isn’t failure; it’s the start of a more fertile future.
What emerged offers insight for any organization ready to shift from urgency to imagination, from control to co-creation, and from performance to transformation.
Old Beliefs: Deconditioning the System
We began with beliefs—those hardwired narratives and cultural scripts that quietly shape how organizations work and who they serve. Some of the most persistent included:
“Change is slow and incremental.”
“If people just understood, they would care.”
“You need credentials to lead.”
“The system is broken” (instead of: “It was built this way.”)
These narratives function as what Dark Matter Labs calls invisible infrastructures—the beliefs beneath the buildings, the mindsets beneath the metrics. Drawing from popular education, we understand that transformation begins with conscientização—the process of recognizing and naming these internalized logics as products of power.
Until we unlearn these beliefs, we risk replicating the very systems we claim to oppose.
Outdated Strategies: When Tactics Outlive the Moment
Next, we surfaced the strategies that organizations return to out of habit—not impact:
Respectability politics
Extractive public engagement
Avoiding conflict
Assuming access = engagement
Professionalizing everything
Using the same strategies with different tools
As systems thinking reminds us, today’s challenges are often the result of yesterday’s solutions. These tactics may have once served a purpose, but when context shifts, so must our methods.
Facilitative leadership challenges us to move from managing for control to designing for collaboration. That requires letting go of static playbooks and learning to sense and respond—to lead as gardeners, not engineers.
Unspoken Burdens: The Body of the System Speaks
Some truths never make it into strategic plans. They live in the body of the organization—in how we speak (or don’t), in what we reward, in who gets to rest. Participants named:
Resource hoarding
Burnout and emotional exhaustion
Fear of being wrong
Lack of feedback culture
Hidden gatekeeping
Internal competition masked as collaboration
False urgency as a badge of commitment
These aren’t just “soft” issues. They are structural. In Warm Data terms, they are signals of a system that’s relationally unwell. When fear, exhaustion, or performance dominate, we block the very feedback loops needed for adaptation and growth.
Composting here means creating space for what’s buried to be named. For truth-telling to become a cultural norm—not a risk.
What Becomes Possible: Designing for Emergence
As we moved through the composting process, a new horizon came into view—not a static vision, but a living set of possibilities:
Power that is shared and generative
Imagination as a public good
Story, art, and design as strategic infrastructure
Communities not as users, but as builders
Decision-making rooted in frontline wisdom
This is what Theory U describes as the shift from downloading to presencing—from repeating past patterns to sensing what is emerging. It’s also what regenerative futures frameworks call designing with life, not against it.
These are not dreams in the abstract. They are instructions. They are invitations to practice new ways of being, organizing, and relating.
Lessons for Organizations: Five Composting Moves
Whether you’re a nonprofit, public agency, or movement hub, these five practices can help your team compost what no longer serves and prepare for what’s next:
Make Composting a Ritual
Treat unlearning as strategy. Regularly pause to ask: What beliefs, strategies, or behaviors are we holding onto that no longer align with our values or context?
Relinquish Control, Grow Capacity
Embrace facilitative leadership. Lead less through certainty and more through curiosity, trust-building, and collective direction-setting.
Slow Down to See the Whole
In the spirit of Warm Data, design time for reflection, emergence, and relationship-building—not just output. Create spaces where complexity can be held, not simplified away.
Act from Emergence, Not Inertia
Design for adaptability, not perfection. Create light prototypes. Invite feedback early. Let culture guide the form, not the other way around.
Treat Imagination as Strategic Infrastructure
Elevate storytelling, collective visioning, and artistic practice as legitimate leadership tools. As one participant said: “People need wonder and surprise to keep going.”
Conclusion: Beyond Resilience—Toward Regeneration
Resilience asks: how do we withstand the storm?
Regeneration asks: how do we transform the conditions that made the storm inevitable?
The world doesn’t need more perfect plans. It needs more courageous composters—people and organizations willing to lay down what no longer serves in order to grow something far more alive, responsive, and just.
Letting go is not an act of loss. It’s an act of design.
And composting is where the future begins.